Jesus, Hudson, you sure know how to fuck up a crime scene.
Blue salt crystals dug into his knees, stuck to his palms as a final spasm racked his body. At the Fast Mart across from an empty furniture store, Investigator Ryan Hudson pressed his forehead to the cold concrete of the sidewalk. It grounded him, stopped the world from spinning out of control, if only for a few seconds.
Jesus, Hudson. He heard his friend’s voice as clearly as though Garrison were standing next to him. It was something they’d said to each other often, during the decade they’d spent on patrol together. Never serious, and almost always accompanied by a ribbing or an elbow nudge, it was a deflection, a way of one placing his blame onto the other, like when they’d been called to Breaker’s office after Garrison wrote forty parking tickets for the wrong side of the street. “Jesus, Hudson,” Garrison had muttered. Or, the time Hudson had misheard an address over the radio, and when they arrived, the resident––believing her friends had gifted her male strippers for her birthday––ushered them inside. “Jesus, Garrison,” Hudson laughed as he’d recounted the story back in the locker room. Garrison had unbuttoned his uniform then, revealing his black undershirt, and set his foot up on the bench in a mock striptease. Someone walked by and smacked his ass.
Wincing as though he’d been the one to get shot, Hudson cautiously rose to sit on his heels. He looked over his left shoulder, where across the street, Garrison’s department SUV was parked. It looked like a dog waiting for its owner to come back.
A gust of wind tore through the lot, almost knocking him backward. The lake effect ripped the tears from his cheek, gnawed at the exposed skin of his legs. A plastic cone toppled over and rolled across the snow-scraped asphalt. His eyes followed it as it tumbled toward him and butted up against the curb.
Gingerly, Hudson stood. He swayed and planted his feet shoulder-width apart to steady himself. His throat burned. This was the first time in eleven years he’d thrown up at a scene. That was reserved for amateurs. Baby cops.
Even when Hudson had been a baby cop, he hadn’t acted like one. He couldn’t afford to. Wiry and spectacled, he looked more like an IT guy than a police officer. It didn’t take much to pass the physical litmus test anymore. If you could manage twenty-five push-ups, run a mile in under ten minutes, and be of reasonably sound mind, you were hired. Because just like Hudson couldn’t afford to act like a baby cop, the Black Harbor Police Department couldn’t afford to be picky.
All around him, blue and red lights danced like the aurora borealis. Both Black Harbor and Wesson police vehicles were at the scene. Taking a deep breath and steeling himself for what he was about to walk back into, Hudson reentered the doorway he’d run out of a moment before, stepping aside as a patrol officer came through. The stink hit him again like a skid of bricks. It smelled like blood and shit and coffee.
With all the ins and outs, it was as cold inside as it was outside, though at least it was out of the wind. Camera flashes burst, yellow placards marked evidence, fingerprint powder saturated the contact surfaces.
Garrison lay on his back, staring empty-eyed and slack-jawed at his own blood spattered on the ceiling. The story of how he ended up like that was punctuated by the bullet hole in his neck. Two more projectiles were punched in his vest, dislodging the personal effects he kept in the center pocket: a picture of his wife and daughter, a couple of postage stamps, a twenty-dollar bill. Hudson stood over Garrison in a jacket and gym shorts, wearing socks and Adidas sliders. He’d been in bed when Breaker, his former lieutenant, called with the news. “Garrison’s been shot,” he barked, and before Hudson could process what he’d heard, the lieutenant rattled off an address Hudson immediately recognized as the store he and Garrison had been watching for robbery activity. Used to watch.
Guilt burned a hole in his stomach. He never should have gone upstairs. A promotion to investigator could have waited. After all, Hudson was staring down the barrel of another twenty years in law enforcement. He could have stayed with Garrison for his last few months before retirement. Had the tables been turned, Garrison would have done it for him.
Investigator Devine escorted the female witness outside, likely to find her a ride home, since the suspect had stolen her car. Hudson had observed Devine interviewing her earlier. She’d sat in the candy aisle with her knees tucked into her chest, rocking backward and forward, like a buoy stranded in a low tide.
Now, he heard Investigator Fletcher interviewing the cashier. According to the man’s statement, he’d been held at gunpoint by a suspect clothed in all black: long-sleeve shirt, pants, and a balaclava, the fabric of which had been bunched up to expose a patch of light-colored skin. “Anything unique about him?” Fletcher asked. “Identifying features like scars, tattoos?”
“He had a mark on his neck,” was all the cashier said.
“Anything else? Approximate height and weight? Eye color?”
Hudson stared at the floor. Saw the pool of blood becoming more viscous in the cold. Saw Fletcher’s snakeskin cowboy boots. And he focused on them, anything to not look at Garrison. His eyes traced the outline of the pointed toes, scales carved in rounded diamond patterns, rivers of black that divided the continents of greys. Who wore cowboy boots in the city?
Fletcher scribbled something in his memo pad, shoved it in his back pocket.
Devine returned inside and joined his partner. “You got surveillance?” he asked the cashier.
“No. The camera’s been busted…”
Their voices were drowned out by the blood rushing in Hudson’s ears. Any other time, any other victim, he would have listened intently for any morsel he could pick up and file away for later to help solve the case, for when he built his own case to move to the Robberies Unit once Fletcher’s or Devine’s time was up. But tonight’s victim was Garrison, and Wesson PD—the neighboring jurisdiction—would be taking over anyway. He was just here to stand watch until Medical Examiner Winthorp arrived and pronounced Garrison dead at the scene.
“Fuck me.” Breaker stood beside him. His eyes were bloodshot. “You all right?”
Hudson set his jaw, locking in a sob. He tried to nod. He was all right, considering he still had a pulse. “You call Noelle?”
“I was just leaving to go over there. Did you want to come?”
Hudson swallowed. He couldn’t imagine showing up at Garrison’s house, ringing the doorbell, seeing his wife and daughter’s faces when Breaker delivered the news.
Breaker took his silence as a no. He set his hand on Hudson’s shoulder. “You should go home. Tell Miserelli to come sit with you. This is Wesson’s investigation anyway.” He left, then, to inform Noelle Garrison she was now a widow.
Hudson’s stomach twisted. He could taste the bile making a resurgence up his esophagus. His mouth began to salivate and a cold sheen of sweat beaded on his neck and forehead only to be instantly wicked away by the cold. His eyes drifted to Garrison. He almost didn’t look real, like he was made of wax. His skin was too ashen, his blood too bright. Shaking, Hudson knelt to examine Garrison’s trauma plate. His uniform was unzipped; he’d undoubtedly been reaching into his vest’s center pocket to pay for his coffee when the shooter entered the store. One bullet had chipped his ID card; it looked like a hole punch had bitten the edge from it. He saw the photograph of Garrison’s family; it was worn, the corners rounded. A piece of faded red paper peeked out from beneath it. It looked like a raffle ticket, the kind torn from a roll at bars and high school football games.
He checked to see if anyone had eyes on him. No one did. They were all searching for casings and latent prints. Hudson tugged the ticket from Garrison’s pocket. Crouched, he examined it, shielding it in his hands like a flame. The bottom right corner was singed. On the front, the words ADMIT ONE were stamped, and on the back, a message:
Welcome to The Ruins
Where your true self dwells
“The Ruins,” he whispered. The place didn’t ring a bell. He stood and was about to google it when another whoosh of cold air assaulted him.
“Christ.” ME Winthorp appeared next to him. Her black earmuffs looked like giant bolts screwed into her skull. “Why’d it have to be him?” She knelt beside the body, pressed two latex fingers to Garrison’s throat. “Deceased. You got the time, Officer?”
He was “Investigator” now, but Hudson didn’t correct her. He touched the center button on his phone. “Eleven forty-seven.”
“December nineteen, twenty-three forty-seven hours,” she said into her recorder. “You know how much longer they got?”
He didn’t remember answering. Time crashed into him hard as a wave and when he broke free, it was around 2:00 A.M. and Garrison was stiff with rigor mortis. He watched as three men from the coroner’s office arrived and lifted him into a black polyethylene bag. The zipper’s teeth connected as the bag swallowed Garrison, and he felt the ugly, finite sound of it, like a serrated knife ripping him from bottom to top, gutting him like a fish.